End of Trapdoor Technologies (and Playbook)?

TrickyUK

Explorer
Just received an email with this message:

Dear Trapdoor Technologies fans and Playbook subscribers,

On Wednesday, Oct 19th, Slingshot Capital Partners, the group who own Trapdoor decided to close our company immediately. It is now the staff and management's sad duty to tell you that there will be no new products, product updates, Trapdoor Tuesday releases or other company functions. As you may already know, our Kickstarter campaign for Playbook Essentials on Android has also been canceled. Despite the efforts of the former staff to find a way to keep Playbook going, we have exhausted our options.

The Trapdoor servers which power Playbook will be going offline on or around October 28, 2016. However, even once the servers are offline, Playbook will continue to function. There will be two phases of functionality: during the remainder of your subscription and after your subscription expires.

For the remainder of your current subscription, the app will be running in offline mode. You will still be able to read all the books in your library (both free and purchased). You can still generate characters.

The Party module chat, sharing, in-app purchases in the Store, and announcements will cease to function. Since you won't be able to download new content - please make sure you download any content you want to have available offline.

After your current subscription expires (at the end of the month or year, depending on the level you chose in the app store), Playbook will function in read-only mode.

You will still be able to read any content that you have purchased but the rule books that are included s part of the subscription will cease to function. Previously-created characters will still be available to read and print, but you will not be able to modify the characters or roll up new ones.

Thank you, first and foremost, to the players and fans who helped us bring a mobile, digital RPG companion to life. We are all heart-broken over what might-have-been.

We'd also like to thank our amazing partners. Paizo as a company and their staff as individuals as well as all the Pathfinder Society Officers, have been wonderful to work with. We are so grateful to you for making a great game and putting your fans first. We're excited for Starfinder and crushed we won't be making a Playbook for it.

All our love also goes out to AAW, Legendary Games, and Playground Adventures. Hunt up their stuff online. They're making astounding content with great stories. Though we won’t be bringing them to Playbook, you know we’ll be playing with them at our own game tables.

We also want to shout out to all the media who have put us in their articles and podcasts: GeekDad, TableTop Terrors, The Tome Show, DnDUI, Melvin Smifs Geekery, the Angry GM, BoardgameGeek, and Know Direction!

There are literally hundreds of other people to thank but, part of saying goodbye is knowing when to actually go. Thank you for giving us a shot. We're sorry we have to leave, just as the party was getting started.

Keep gaming,
All of us who were Trapdoor Technologies
 

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delericho

Legend
It's always a shame to see a company fold, and I feel for the staff who are undoubtedly going to be affected negatively by this. I hope they land on their feet.

Unfortunately, though, I'm not surprised by this - basically, it has been coming from the day they lost their 5e tie-in.
 

Per
It's always a shame to see a company fold, and I feel for the staff who are undoubtedly going to be affected negatively by this. I hope they land on their feet.

Unfortunately, though, I'm not surprised by this - basically, it has been coming from the day they lost their 5e tie-in.
Agreed. Sad but not a surprise.
Honestly, I'm only surprised it took this long.

They had their first failed Kickstarter. Then released the app, and didn't do anything with it. Then they managed to get the Pathfinder licence, didn't do much with the new app, and then launched their second failed Kickstarter.

But they continued down the path of Pathfinder, despite there already being a featur complete character builder for that system. While much prettier and easier in terms of UI, it just could not compete with HeroLabs in terms of content or features. the one route it could have taken to save themselves was being ready for the 5e SRD. But they burn d that bridge and doubled down on Pathfinder, a system they never had any chance of finishing the content for.
(They *just* added traits this past month in an update, bringing the app into the realm of bare minimum features for beginner pre-gen PFS play.)

The noteworthy features of the app (campaign management, note sharing, and like) were the selling features, but never perfectly implemented. And the focus on iPads made adoption hard for many.
 

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